baracine

Story of a Love Affair (1950), Michelangelo Antonioni's first feature film, is now available in North-America from NOSHAME in a digitally restored version on DVD (http://www.noshamefilms.com/catalogu...1.asp?pdno=13).

You can read DVD Savant's review here.

Story: (Spoilers) Groundlessly jealous of his wife’s romantic past, Enrico Fontana hires a private detective to finally determine whether she is faithful or not. Ironically, his suspicious attitude unconsciously brings his wife Paola (Lucia Bosé) together with Guido (Massimo Girotti), a man with whom she had once been in love. Paola and Guido’s past was clouded in tragedy. Guido had been involved with Paola’s close female friend’s death. Their passion rekindled once again, the lovers even get to the point where they are thinking about murdering Enrico…

Video: Restored digitally from a positive print which has been also chemically cleaned up. Some artifacts originated in the bad developing system used at the time which created grey shadows around dark objects on a paler background - the so-called "priest's hat" effect. They have been removed (and replaced by a whither background, if you ask me.) This gives the film a generally soft edge. The picture is slightly ghosted in slow-motion and the film has a definite 1/25 speed-up which exacerbates some scenes which appear to have been simply shot at a higher than normal speed, like the hero keeping warm waiting for Enrico's car. It is important to note that most Europeans consider this speed-up "normal". Must be the coffee.

Sound: Considerably cleaned-up for clarity but still suffers from the aforementioned speed-up which makes it even tinnier. The mono sound spreads out nicely in Pro Logic II and bass is present. The English-language dubbing allows the viewer to identify the scenes that were cut for export (they are in Italian): almost every scene which involves physical contact between Girotti and Bosé or their planning of her husband's demise (which are the same scenes). I wonder what Americans could make from this truncated version. The music score is for saxophone and piano and alternates between 40's-style French film music à la Maurice Jaubert (Quai des Brumes) and really prescient jazz underscoring à la Miles Davis. Slick it is.

My impression: A high-society version of Visconti's Ossessione, which was itself the first (illegal) screen version of the novel "The Postman Always Rings Twice", this film has one foot in turgid photo novella melodramas tinged with film noir and one foot in modernist/existentialist cinema where every landscape is meant not to ground the characters but to measure the psychological distance between them. Many experts in the DVD extras extemporize on Antonioni's belonging to the Italian neo-realist movement of the time when in truth he couldn't have been more removed from it if he had tried. Especially troubling is the vision of a godless (i.e. Church-less) ultra-rich, ultra-bored, apparently aimless milanese society, which is the normal milieu of most of his subsequent films (with different cities, of course). The fashions are particularly scream-inducing. Imagine Christian Dior on acid. All of Antonioni's future themes appeared here first. The whole is extremely entertaining. Possible influences on Hitchcock's Vertigo (feminine mystique and troublesome identity expressed through sartorial elegance) and Psycho (the lovers in bed planning a better future).

wendersfan

My first thought is that I haven't seen it. Funny how one sort of assumes that Antoniona must have reinvented himself completely starting with L'Avventura, but at least the seeds of his future greatness must have been around all along.